Slurrp! Ccrrunch! Cuckoo! Music lives in everything! So say the brochures and the T-shirts at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. And if all of that sounds to you like an extreme case of inclusion, then that’s exactly what it is.
There’s not a lot, really, that Huddersfield’s new artistic director Graham McKenzie wants to leave out: downloads, biotechnology, white noise, silence, degraded instruments and found objects all figure on his little list. I experienced two of this year’s showcasings: part of a retrospective of the music of Morton Feldman; and the compositional skills of the virtuoso bassist Barry Guy.
As a microcosm of the new diversity of the festival, this was the perfect combination. The Feldman was an entire hour and a half of near rigor mortis, with single notes and chords played by members of the Smith Quartet and pianist John Tilbury at unchanging tempi and dynamic levels. Piano, violin, viola, cello was Feldman’s last completed work, written in 1987, and it apparently aims to create a “continuum of awareness”. My own was heightened to the point at which I found it well-nigh irresistible to jump up, break the reverent silence, and yell “Put a sock in it!”.
And so from the dim religious light of St Paul’s Church to the Lawrence Batley Theatre, and Oort-Entropy. The Barry Guy New Orchestra, a funky combo of ten musicians embarked on Guy’s hour-long piece in three continuous sections, each one prefaced by a solo from one of the wind players.
That, at least, was how the listener navigated. For within Guy’s daring and imaginative composition, solo and group improvisations deconstructed and brilliantly reconstructed themselves with breathtaking audacity. When Guy wasn’t conducting, he’d hurl himself at his bass, and join his sax, trumpet, trombone, clarinet, tuba, piano and percussion colleagues in the fun.
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Earlier that afternoon, in the Town Hall, Thomas Zehetmair had conducted the Northern Sinfonia in beautifully played tributes to Ligeti. Then, joined by the soprano Patricia Rozario and violist Ruth Kilius, they gave the first performance of Farness, John Casken’s somewhat over-written, over-heated setting of three slight poems by Carol Ann Duffy.
Highlights on Saturdays in December at 11pm, Radio 3